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By Steve Levy
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About this blog: I grew up in Los Angeles and moved to the area in 1963 when I started graduate school at Stanford. Nancy and I were married in 1977 and we lived for nearly 30 years in the Duveneck school area. Our children went to Paly. We moved ...
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About this blog: I grew up in Los Angeles and moved to the area in 1963 when I started graduate school at Stanford. Nancy and I were married in 1977 and we lived for nearly 30 years in the Duveneck school area. Our children went to Paly. We moved downtown in 2006 and enjoy being able to walk to activities. I do not drive and being downtown where I work and close to the CalTrain station and downtown amenities makes my life more independent. I have worked all my life as an economist focusing on the California economy. My work centers around two main activities. The first is helping regional planning agencies such as ABAG understand their long-term growth outlook. I do this for several regional planning agencies in northern, southern and central coast California. My other main activity is studying workforce trends and policy implications both as a professional and as a volunteer member of the NOVA (Silicon Valley) and state workforce boards. The title of the blog is Invest and Innovate and that is what I believe is the imperative for our local area, region, state and nation. That includes investing in people, in infrastructure and in making our communities great places to live and work. I served on the recent Palo Alto Infrastructure Commission. I also believe that our local and state economy benefits from being a welcoming community, which mostly we are a leader in, for people of all religions, sexual preferences and places of birth.
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Allowing Unauthorized Immigrants to Learn and Earn Legally Will Help the Economy
Uploaded: Apr 11, 2014
There are approximately 2.5 million unauthorized immigrant residents in California of which approximately 1.5 million are working and another 300,000 or so are children.
If they are allowed to learn and earn (study and work) legally, it would benefit them and the overall state economy. In this blog I am not raising issues of citizenship or eligibility for safety net program benefits but merely the right to pay tuition and go to college and work and pay taxes legallyi.e., out of the shadows.
Some of these working age residents will probably work in low wage jobs for a long time. But some of them already have skills that would earn higher wages and help employers if they were allowed to work legally. In addition some could benefit from training if they were eligible for the training and then could use their higher skills.
And all of the children could benefit as would our economy if they are allowed to learn and earn legally. This is the basis for efforts to help these "Dreamers"residents who were brought to this country as children.
In our Bay Area work on mobility for low and moderate wage workers, we identified projects and models that are operating successfully but at a small scale30, 50 or 100 people helped at a time.
Here is a chance to improve the mobility chances for some of the 400,000 to 500,000 unauthorized immigrants in the Bay Area and many more statewide.
The term unauthorized immigrant is the current official designation used by the Department of Homeland Security under the first President Bush. The prior official designation was undocumented immigrant. Please use either of these designations if you wish to reply to this blog. Thanks.
Democracy.
What is it worth to you?
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